Ever since installing Catalyst 5.3, a System erros keeps coming up in Event viewer. It always comes up 30-50 entries long. It happens several times a day since the install. So far it actually hasnt affected my system that i can tell but it still worries me that something serious could come up soon. Any help?

I only have the x800 Pro Vivo. It started with the Cat 5.3's because it never happened before that. I always use driver cleaner for installing new drivers. It also doesnt seem to actually do anything negative that I have noticed but I wouldnt mind having it stop.

P.S Im using the non-catalyst control center driver 5.3 with WDM driver if that makes a difference.

I have a X800 Pro (non Vivo) and have not installed the WDM drivers. The reason we get these messages with 5.3 and further is because ATI has enabled some sort of error logging in their drivers since 5.3.

i have a connect3d x800 xt-pe and get error messages in the event viewer every minute using net framework 1.1 with all updates from ms for xp. i also lose my tray icon after some time without doing anything. WDM Drivers are installed

I'm running a PowerColor Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB, and I've got the same issue as well with ati2mtag giving an 'invalid pixel format', but it only shows up when loading certain games (GTAIII and Vice City for example). Odd how this only started happening with the newer drivers (v5.1 and up I think it was).

Oh boy. I'm getting this too. I just noticed that my events directory (I keep it on a different drive) has exploded since my last major backup. I checked the event viewer and bam! I see tens of thousands of this message.

I noticed the ati2mtag overload some 6 months ago I guess and left it alone 'cause it didn't seem a critical error. After I resinstalled my windoze recently and looked into event viewer the error stood already there in enormous amounts =)

But I did not install the latest catalyst after fresh installation, so it must be a driver caused error, don't you think.

Hmmm... What happened to the post I made yesterday? (stupid Rage3D's new ISP ) Well here it is again...

This problem showed up earlier this year but went away around 5.8~5.10. It came back in 5.11 although I have not had it for 7 days. Yesterday I got a few standalone instances (not 1,000 in a row) as well as another 1,000-entry-run.

It's very annoying because it does not provide any useful information and drowns out other messages that may be useful. One entry is sufficient! On my system, every time it happens it spits out exactly 136 messages all at the same time!

What's worse is that I keep the logs on a different drive and have it set to keep the maximum amount. The log files have exploded to over 20MB because of this. ATI really needs to fix this immediately. I'll be sending them feedback about it and I suggest everyone else do so as well. If you are note registered, submit it using the Catalyst Crew Feedback Form, if you are registered submit a ticket AND with the feedback form.

On a related matter, does anyone know of a way to remove specific entries from the event log? I want to get rid of all but one-per-instance of the ATI entries and keep everything else. I've looked around but could not find anything that works.

Synetech, I'm in the middle of a week-long ticket with ATI over this issue (via ATI's deathly slow https site, which is run on two 486's with 56K modems in a basement in Toronto), and I'll report back here with the results. So far, the best I've gotten out of them is that Event Viewer is able to do filtering. Sigh.

I will not back down though, since they haven't a leg to stand on with this issue. It's completely meaningless (even one entry is too many), useless, dangerous in the way it obscures other real information, and can only cost them by clogging their support with people like us.

That said, until they engineer it out of the driver or at least provide a workaround (like a Registry mod), then I too encourage everyone to speak up to them about it. It's the equivalent of spam, but without any chance of increasing one's sexual potency.

As for deleting events out of Event Viewer, I wish. I looked long ago and couldn't find anything, but there must be something out there that does it. I'm sure MS discourages such tools since it makes hiding your tracks easy.

Auric, I have those two error messages as well but only one copy of them at a time. They are genuine messages which are useful. The DVD_OV error is indeed a DVD overlay related message and spits out 136 each time.

Thanks for pointing to the other thread, I'm also experiencing that problem too. Stupid ATI, why to they keep breaking things that were working? As a software developer myself, I can understand that sometimes you mess existing things up when expanding but come on, I'm one person in my house, they're a many-person team of "professionals" with all kinds of checks and balances. Hmmm... Microsoft?

Auric, I do not have the DVD player or MMC installed; further, I've never seen the two errors you speak of.

It's interesting that you don't get the DVD_OV one though, which should be exceedingly easy to get even if you never touch a DVD drive. I get it merely for playing AVI's with Bsplayer! Do you play many media files?

Perhaps if we figure out why you DON'T get them we can emulate what you're doing.

I play media files of all kinds very frequently. As said in the other thread I use Overlay Theater Mode for TVO, VMR7 windowed output from MPC with a combo of filters and decoders from those integrated with MPC and fddshow as well as Cyberlink's, plus QT & Real Alternative.

No idea why the difference in errors but clearly ATI needs to shape up.

The good folks at ATI have provided me what appears to be a workaround. I'm off to try it now and suggest others give it a whirl as well:

Quote:

I have done alot of digging and have found a workaround so that only the ati2mtag events are not logged.

As this issue doesn't happen in my system, I had to use the "Service Control Manager" source as my test. When I did this, I no longer had these entries in the Event Log (I had hundreds, after the modification, no more were created).

In the registry, go to the following location:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Eventlog\System

You will see a "REG_MULTI_SZ" entry on the right for Sources. Double click on this and find "ati2mtag" in the list, highlight and delete only this entry. Click OK.

Repeat for these registry locations:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\Eventlog\System

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Eventlog\System

Note: Your system may vary. For example, mine didn't have a 'ControlSet002' branch but it did have a 'ControlSet003' -- change what's appropriate for what you have. Also, while 'ati2mtag' was present in the 'ControlSet001' and 'ControlSet003' branches for me, it wasn't in 'CurrentControlSet'.

Initially, I made the changes and without rebooting tested for the problem (running AVI files) -- the problem was still there. So I figured the changes don't take effect until reboot. After rebooting, I casually checked the Registry, and to my horror, found that 'ati2mag' returned in both places.

It's the monster that won't go away.

So while this attempt at a solution may be onto something, and may work for other events like "Service Control Manager," it doesn't work for this one.

The best solution of all would be to figure out why some people don't have this issue in the first place.

The best solution is for ATI—who has the source code and knows exactly what is happening and why it does it (or at least should)—to edit their code to remove the bug that is causing it or at least make sure that only one entry per incident is written. At least for the time being, they should explain what the heck it means so that we can try to figure out for ourselves.